


Secrets to Keep

by samariumwriting



Series: Claurenz Week [2]
Category: Fire Emblem Series, Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dragons, Claurenz Week 2020, Dragons, Friendship, Implied/Referenced Racism, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-23
Updated: 2020-01-23
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:21:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22380232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samariumwriting/pseuds/samariumwriting
Summary: Claude can speak to dragons. This would be pretty cool, if it wasn't something only he could do. Because it was unique, and that meant he had to hide it, and that's not exactly the easiest thing to hide. Especially from one Lorenz Hellman Gloucester.-Claude, quite frankly, didn’t understand the people of Almyra or of Fódlan. Right in front of them they had these wonderful, beautiful creatures, full of grace and pride. And what did they do? They tethered them to a post, forced them into battle, and used them as nothing more than horses that could coincidentally fly.
Relationships: Lorenz Hellman Gloucester & Claude von Riegan, Lorenz Hellman Gloucester/Claude von Riegan
Series: Claurenz Week [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1610119
Comments: 11
Kudos: 88
Collections: Claurenz Week: Winter 2020





	Secrets to Keep

**Author's Note:**

> This is for day four of Claurenz Week, using the prompt of dragons! I had a lot of fun with this one honestly, it's an au I kinda want to pick up again maybe.

When Claude moved into Garreg Mach Monastery to start at the Officer’s Academy, he arrived slightly earlier than most of the other students. He was the kind of person to be early to rise, and he tried to pack light. Sure, he brought a case full of bottles and herbs, and another full of clothes, but other than that he didn’t see the use for much else.

The point to all that was that he was left to his own devices just as everyone else was starting to arrive, which meant he could find a point somewhere at the top of a staircase or on a ledge where he could observe everyone as they arrived. That also meant he got to watch all the dragons flying in, carrying almost every imaginable item and passenger.

He watched the snow white dragons from Gautier territory, carrying numerous large and tightly bound trunks and two men with bright red hair. He was nearly swept from his observation point by the breeze as one pitch black and two red and black dragons carried a couple of riders and several huge dragon scale cases.

There were dragons of every shape, every colour. Some were young, like the slim dark green dragon carrying both a rider and a small case, while some, like the huge brown dragon he recognised from the western side of Fódlan’s Throat, were far older. The ones that caught his attention most, however, despite the relatively high number of times he’d seen dragons of their kind before, were the three bright purple dragons from Gloucester territory.

Dragons didn’t normally come in purple. They also didn’t normally come with scales of red red edged with black like the dragons - which he imagined belonged to the Hresvelg family - that he’d seen earlier. Normally, they came in natural colours that matched their landscapes, but sometimes families bred theirs to look a certain way, just for the sake of prestige and having the flashiest, biggest, fastest dragon.

Claude, quite frankly, didn’t understand the people of Almyra or of Fódlan. Right in front of them they had these wonderful, beautiful creatures, full of grace and pride. And what did they do? They tethered them to a post, forced them into battle, and used them as nothing more than horses that could coincidentally fly.

He didn’t get it at all. Dragons were incredibly intelligent creatures, and yet everyone passed them by like they were just common animals. Actually, that sounded pretty familiar. People from Fódlan could probably stand to apply some critical thinking skills to more than just their dragon companions.

Once everyone had moved in and Claude could no longer spend his afternoon dragon watching (and, by extension, people watching), things settled very much into pretty much exactly what Claude had expected from the Academy. Lots of talking. Lots of politics. Surprisingly little studying from a lot of people, considering they were in a school.

Claude tried to balance a bit of everything, and found himself promptly swamped with a lot of things he should be doing, a lot of things he wanted to do, and a whole ton of things that he absolutely loathed. And, worst of all, basically no time for himself.

But when things got a little much, Claude found that the best thing to do was go to the dragon pens. Dragons could hold a conversation without him worrying about the twenty layers of politics concerned (just last week, he’d made the mistake of mentioning family to a group of students from Faerghus. He would not be talking about fathers ever again).

The only problem with dragons being the only good kind of conversation in the whole monastery was that it was pretty important that no one knew he could talk to dragons. Which severely limited the time he could spend in the pens to very, very strange hours that he should probably spend sleeping.

It wasn’t that it was a bad thing. Honestly, Claude thought it was a pretty good thing that he could talk to dragons. He could learn a whole lot of stuff about the world that many, many other people had exactly no access to. The problem was more that he didn’t know what other people would think about it.

The reason he could speak to the dragons in the first place was because he’d spent so much time running from other people. Being unable to trust other people. If he couldn’t talk to the people in court, he may as well talk to their dragons. It wasn’t exactly something that most people could do, and he was proud of it, but he was worried people might end up getting the wrong idea. What if they thought the way he could talk to dragons was suspicious? Or that it was unnatural?

More than anything, it was just something else that marked him out as an outsider. Someone who didn’t belong with everyone else. And he needed to hide as many of those traits as possible if he wanted to find even a shaky acceptance from others in Fódlan.

So, that meant he went to a lot of effort to hide the conversations he had. He’d come out to the dragon pens when everyone else was at meals, or in the very early mornings, or very late at night. When people did come in, he just ducked into the stall of his own Riegan dragon and fussed over her. She always appreciated that anyway, and caring about his dragon was an eccentricity the people of Fódlan would allow him to indulge.

One early morning, though, he apparently wasn’t early enough. He’d crawled out of bed before dawn on a Sunday morning, a surefire way to have a proper conversation when everyone else would probably be taking one of their only chances at a lie in. He let his voice ring out loud and clear as he greeted each dragon by name, asked them about their weeks, asked after the babies Claiomh’s mate back in Fraldarius had been expecting.

He got so caught up in everything he wanted to say, everyone he wanted to talk to, that he stopped listening out for the sound of the enclosure door opening. So when he turned around to head back to the entrance and give his dragon a brush down, he was faced with Lorenz.

Claude would admit it, he jumped about a foot in the air and only just saved a scrap of his dignity by restraining himself from scrabbling backwards in the dirt underfoot. “Lorenz!” he said, plastering a smile onto his face. “Lovely morning, isn’t it? A great day to be up bright and early.”

“Clearly,” Lorenz said, one eyebrow raised. “What were you doing, Claude?”

“Oh, you know,” he said, waving an arm in the air. “Talking to myself. Sometimes it helps the thought process to say things aloud.”

“That’s strange,” Lorenz said, “because I could have sworn you were speaking in a language I didn’t understand. What was it?”

Claude could tell the truth and face the consequences. Or he could lie. He could tell Lorenz that he had his own language that he spoke to himself so no one could know his schemes. Or he could...yeah, he could deflect. “Why do I need to tell you?” He felt a little like a petulant child saying it, but it was the easiest option. There was no one here to pretend around other than Lorenz.

“Well,” Lorenz said, and Claude wanted to tell him he looked ridiculous when he puffed out his chest like that, but he didn’t know if the feedback would be appreciated right now, “what’s stopping me from telling everyone that you talk to dragons?”

So, he’d worked out exactly what it was he was doing. How long had Lorenz been there without him knowing? For just a second, Claude felt a bolt of fear strike his heart, but he pushed it aside. He couldn’t let Lorenz use this against him. He couldn’t let him crush this piece of joy and turn it into something ugly. “And what would be the point in that?” he asked.

“You’re hiding it,” Lorenz said. “Like a scoundrel. Like you’re doing something wrong. Why should I not tell people?”

Claude scoffed. “Who would even believe you?” he asked. “And what’s the problem with it anyway?”

“You could be doing anything with these creatures,” Lorenz said, eyeing the slate grey Charon dragon Claude had seen Catherine ride. His eyes were full of suspicion, like Claude was plotting to overthrow the Church with her or something (he had, in fact, been discussing the best way to help her keep her scales dry after the downpours that seemed to follow Catherine around).

“Okay,” Claude said, hopping up to sit on the fence, his back to the dragon Lorenz apparently feared so much. “So you go away. You tell someone - let’s say Leonie - that I can talk to dragons. What do you achieve, other than seeming overly obsessed with me and revealing a cool fact about me that can easily be construed as a talent I have that you don’t?”

Lorenz pursed his lips. “You make a fair point,” he said, “but I’m warning you, Claude. I know your secret, and I will not allow you to scheme in the shadows with dragons. The Alliance deserves better than that.”

Claude opened his mouth to reply, but Lorenz was already stalking away, out of the dragon pens and back towards the main monastery buildings. Shakily, he let out a heavy sigh. “I royally messed that one up, didn’t I?” he said, speaking more to the air than anything. In reply, he was met with the huffing laughter of at least a dozen dragons. At least that managed to lighten his mood a little.

From then on, Lorenz kept ‘coincidentally’ coming into the dragon pens whenever Claude was there. He said it was to make sure that nothing suspicious was going on, but Claude wasn’t entirely convinced. For one, Lorenz definitely couldn’t understand what he was saying to the dragons, so there was absolutely no way he’d know if Claude was plotting something. Whatever ‘something’ was, because Lorenz sure wasn’t telling him.

But the other thing that tipped Claude off to the fact that Lorenz maybe wasn’t just doing what he did to be a pompous asshole was that Lorenz was actually pretty good with dragons. He’d expected as much from some of the things the dragon from Gloucester, Ruza, had told him about Lorenz, but it was still interesting to see.

While Claude chatted to the dragons, Lorenz usually interacted with them in silence, even though dragons could understand the Fódlan language with relative ease. That wasn’t the point, though; the point was that Lorenz actually interacted with them. He didn’t treat them like objects, or as if they were just there to perform a task and eat food. He was happy to douse the Gautier dragon (Psychra) in water to help him keep cool, or to pick up a brush to get tangles out of Snjor’s - Dimitri’s dragon - fur.

He was a kind person, really, full of compassion for the lives of others. And it was clear to see that he actually respected dragons, even when he couldn’t understand them in the way Claude did. On occasion, he even asked Claude what a dragon was saying, or what they thought about a particular thing. It was nice, he supposed, to have someone know about what he could do and just be normal about it.

One weekend, as autumn was drawing to a close and the weather was starting to get on the bitter side, Claude decided that he should take their little informal dragon meetings to another level. Recently, Lorenz had been downright asking him when he’d be going to the pens, and Claude had never seen a reason to lie about it. He sort of liked the company. Lorenz wasn’t half bad alone, at least compared to how he was around others.

“Hey, Lorenz,” he said, about half an hour into his deep conversation with Snjor about winter in Fhirdiad. “Do you want to fly with me? On Altibu?”

Lorenz glanced over towards the dragon Claude had brought with him from Riegan. He hesitated for a moment, a strange look on his face, and then replied. “If she can fit two, then I...don’t see why not.”

Claude smiled at him, hoping Lorenz would see that, this time, his smile was genuine. “Great,” he said. “Climb on, then. I’ll get on in front.” As he spoke, he motioned to Altibu and asked her for permission to ride her. Unsurprisingly, the dragon granted it; she’d asked Claude if she could stretch her wings soon a little earlier that day.

If there was one thing Claude liked better than talking to dragons, it was flying with them. He loved the feeling of the wind in his hair, the air all around him, the sheer freedom of it. There was a profound feeling of connection between him and whichever dragon he flew with, and it made him feel almost like he belonged somewhere. If he belonged anywhere at all, it was with dragons.

Somehow, Claude found that he liked flying even more with Lorenz’s arms wrapped around his waist, hearing Lorenz laugh into the wind, seeing Lorenz smile when there was no one else who could possibly see him. Claude would have to do this more often.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the dragon names have meanings. No, I don't remember them, because I didn't write down said meanings when I wrote this over a week ago. Sorry akhdsfbkjsdf
> 
> Also, try not to think too hard about how the Nabateans are kinda dragons but are totally okay with dragons being used as packhorses,,,,,,
> 
> If you enjoyed this, please consider leaving a comment! :) comments are like lifeblood for authors. You could also hit me up on [twitter](https://twitter.com/samariumwriting) if you want to see more of my work - it's where I give updates of what I'm working on.


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